the frank rivalry of Eudora's
suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys over the division of
household labor. The one thing that had momentarily aroused his somnolent
intelligence was a revival of his wife's plaint anent the unbuilt
bird-house. That, and a certain furtive anxiety during supper lest his
daughter Eudora should forget to keep his plate piled high, were the only
signs of a participation in the life about him.

From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the
audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint amethystine
haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the valley where
the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of
these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the taller of the peaks
still held the high lights. But all the valleys and the spaces between the
mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the crazy house invading the
great company of mountains, penetrating brazenly to the very threshold of
their silent councils, seemed but a pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some
possible giant tread. The ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of
ground with the wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of
keeping with its achievements. Their very weaknesses and vanities, old
Sally still clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts,
an eternal requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the
picturesqueness of the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities,
admissible in the austerest setting. Perhaps in some far distant council
of the Daughters of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of
Rodney would unctuously announce: "My great-great-grandmother was a Miss
Tumlin of Tennessee; great-great-grandfather's first wife had been a Sioux
squaw. Isn't it interesting and romantic?"

Eudora now came to her mother with great news. Hawks had taken the first
opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim's release from jail
and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the eating-house. He had not
deferred the telling from any feeling of reticence regarding the
disclosure of family affairs before strangers. News travels in the desert
by some unknown agency. Twenty-four hours after a thing happened it would
be safe to assume that every cow and sheep outfit in a radius of three
hundred miles would be discussing it over their camp-fires; and this long
before there was an inch of telegraph wire or a